Frozen Pine Peak

Level for Skylar & Plux: Adventure on Clover Island

﻿﻿﻿

Frozen Pine Peak is a custom Level for Skylar & Plux: Adventure on Clover Island, a third person 3d platformer made by Right Nice Games. It was made as an assignment for a level design course at FutureGames over the course of three weeks. My design philosophies for this level were:

VerticalityThe dominant theme of the level is all about constantly climbing and seeing your progress along the way. The player should feel a sense of accomplishment at the end when they stand at the top of the mountain. To get a better sense of progress, the snowfall increases as the player climbs higher.

Escalating difficultyThe difficulty starts off easy and gradually gets more and more challenging. The mechanics are introduced to the player in a safe environment before penalizing failure.

Hidden pickupsThere are many gems hidden in different nooks and crannies throughout the level and the player is encouraged to look around for them. Just before the end there is a cage which requires most of the gems to open. Any player that want to beat this level 100% needs to look around.

New mechanic

The unique mechanic that I added to this level was a modification of the regular swing node already in the game. In the normal game, the player can grapple from floating nodes with an energy beam in order to cross large gaps.
My modified swing nodes starts moving upwards along a spline when the player grabs them and then goes back to the original position when they let go.
This was a welcome addition for the level I wanted to make, since the regular nodes did not work well for vertical levels.